Sugar, Slavery, Fur Trading, and Christianity and Native Religions (681-686)

Sugar and Slavery in Portuguese Brazil
A. Portuguese empire in Brazil depended on production/ export of sugar and relied on African slaves as laborers.
B. The Engenho

• Engenho: sugar mills. The term represents a complex of land, labor, buildings, animals, capital, and technical skills related to the production of sugar.
• Depended on heavy labor for harvesting and planting AND on specialized skills of those who understood sugar-making progress for refined sugar.
• Combined agricultural and industrial industries.
• Owners of sugar mills became highest social position.

C. Slavery

• Colonists first tried to recruit native people, but they resisted. Diseases also reduced indigenous populations.
• Turned to Africans for labor after 1530s
• Working conditions were poor leading to high rates of disease and mortality so there was a high demand for slaves.
• Sugar production was brutal: one ton of sugar cost one human life.

Christianity and Native Religions in the Americas
A. Spanish Missionaries in Mexico and Peru

• Priests served as representatives of the crown and reinforced civil administrators.
• Fransiscan missionaries founded schools to educate natives in Latin and Catholicism.
• Missionaries learned native languages and studied their society to better educate them.
• Many indigenous peoples continued to practice pagan traditions, but others adopted Christianity and looked to missionaries for spiritual guidance.

C. Virgin of Guadalupe

• Became national symbol of Roman Catholic Christianity in Mexico after 1531
• After appearing to a peasant, she gained reputation of performing miracles for those who visited her shrine.

D. French and English Missionaries

• Had less success because North American populations weren't settled in communities.
• English colonists had little interest in converting indigenous peoples.
• French missionaries had modest success along Mississippi and Ohio River valley.

Fur Traders and Settlers in North America

The Fur Trade
• The first European mariners fished.
• Fur was more profitable.
• Fur trade in North America started when fishermen traded with locals.
• The fur trade boomed when the mariners found a short sea route through the hudson bay.
• Native people got the fur then traded with Europeans for manufactured goods.
Effects of the Fur Trade
• Beaver population decreased a lot.
• Natives moved to other territories which led to war between natives.
• Native, European rivalries started when natives sided with european countries
• Settler society
• European settlers displaced native peoples.
• Took hunting grounds for plantations
Cash Crops
• European cash crops didn't grow in North America
• In Virginia they had the cash crop tobacco.
• 1616 the settlers were shipping out massive amounts of tobacco.
• In the 19th century they started to produce cotton.
Indentured Labor
• Plantations needed cheap labor.
• First they brought indentured servants from Europe. (Orphans, criminals, unemployed)
• They offered themselves for a passage across the Atlantic for new lives.
• Many didn't succeed.
Slavery In North America
• 1619 North America started to bring over slaves.
• 1661 Virginia passed the law saying all African Americans were slaves.
• In the Northern colonies slavery wasn't prominent.
• Slaves made the very profitable sugar for rum.
• All North American colonies profited from the slave trade.